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This supposed frequency of resurrection can only undermine the uniqueness of the one by which mankind purchased forgiveness of sins. And there is no cult or religion before or since, from Osiris to vampirism to voodoo, that does not rely on some i
I have spent much of my life as a correspondent and long ago became used to reading firsthand accounts of the very same events I had witnessed, written by people I otherwise trusted, which did not accord with my own. (In my days as a Fleet Street correspondent, I even read stories in print under my own name which were not recognizable to me once the sub-editors had finished with them.) And I have interviewed some of the hundreds of thousands of people who claim to have had direct encounters with spacecraft, or the crew of spacecraft, from another galaxy. Some of these are so vivid and detailed (and so comparable with other depositions from other people who ca
Extend this to the present day, where the statues of virgins or saints are sometimes said to weep or bleed. Even if I could not easily introduce you to people who can produce this identical effect in their spare time, using pig fat or other materials, I would still ask myself why a deity should be content to produce such a paltry effect. As it happens, I am one of the very few people who has ever taken part in the examination of a sainthood «cause», as the Roman Catholic Church calls it. In June of 2001 I was invited by the Vatican to testify at a hearing on the beatification of Agnes Bojaxhiu, an ambitious Albanian nun who had become well-known under the nom de guerre of «Mother Teresa». Although the then pope had abolished the famous office of «Devil’s Advocate», the better to confirm and canonize an enormous number of new «saints», the church was still obliged to seek testimony from critics, and thus I found myself representing the devil, as it were,?pro bono.
I had already helped expose one of the «miracles» co
[Mother Teresa’s] Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and Ken [Macmillan] was adamant that filming was quite impossible there. We only had one small light with us, and to get the place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was quite impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way of insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused…. I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.
He concluded that
This is precisely what miracles are for — to reveal the i
He was certainly correct in that last sentence: by the time he had finished he had made Mother Teresa into a world-famous figure. My contribution was to check out and put into print the direct verbal testimony of Ken Macmillan, the cameraman himself. Here it is:
During Something Beautiful for God, there was an episode where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying. Peter Chafer, the director, said, «Ah well, it’s very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?» And we had just taken delivery at the BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn’t had time to test before we left, so I said to Peter, «Well, we may as well have a go». So we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theater at Ealing Studios and eventually up come the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, «That’s amazing. That’s extraordinary». And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn’t get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun around and said: «It’s divine light! It’s Mother Teresa. You’ll find that it’s divine light, old boy». And three or four days later I found that I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who were saying things like: «We hear you’ve just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle».
So a star was born… For these and for my other criticisms I was invited by the Vatican into a closed room containing a Bible, a tape recorder, a monsignor, a deacon, and a priest, and asked if I could throw any light of my own on the matter of «the Servant of God, Mother Teresa». But, even as they appeared to be asking me this in good faith, their colleagues on the other side of the world were certifying the necessary «miracle» that would allow the beatification (prelude to full canonization) to go forward. Mother Teresa died in 1997. On the first a